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Return on investment of remote work

Published on November 30, 2020   25 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hello, my name is Kate Lister. I'm President of Global Workplace Analytics. Today, we're going to be talking about the return on investment of remote work.
0:12
I don't consider myself a remote worker (sometimes I'm going to use the word 'telework', sometimes I'm going to use the word 'telecommuting'), but I'm talking about the same thing: being able to work from home or someplace closer to home, rather than traveling to the office. I'm not an evangelist and I don't think it's right for every person or every organization, but I've been championing it for over 15 years with my clients because the research I've done convinces me that it should and will be part of the future of work, and the benefits are far greater for organizations that make it happen rather than letting it happen. I started my career as a banker and through a circuitous route that I won't bore you with, got involved in the world of workplace design and workplace strategy about 15 years ago. At the time, remote work was largely being deployed as a tactic for attracting talent and reducing employee work-life conflict, but middle manager resistance was high and senior management was rarely involved in the strategy. As a former banker and a 'numbers nut', I realized that no one had made the business case for change, so that's what we set out to do and that's what we've been doing ever since. While we work with clients on a wide range of workplace strategies and practices, since COVID-19 we've been doing little else other than working with organizations to help them decide on their post-COVID remote and return-to-work strategies.
1:34
Our work is informed by a proprietary library that includes over 6,000 data points. We've tagged and catalogued everything we can put our eyeballs on, that has to do with workplace. In the slide you can see I've done a search on the words 'telework' and 'productivity', and come up with 902 notes.

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